But direct drug crimes account only for a small share of state prison populations, where the majority of inmates in the USA are incarcerated. Recent initiatives have reduced drug sentences and legalized marijuana. There are lifetimes of trauma that fill the prison system, and reform efforts have failed to confront issues of violence.
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Three-quarters of the people we interviewed reported they had seen an assault involving inmates or prison staff.
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An additional 50 percent said they were seriously injured in assaults or accidents as children. Nine out of ten of the people we interviewed got in fights throughout adolescence. In a three-year Boston Re-entry Study, for which I was the chief investigator as part of a Harvard team, half of the 122 people we interviewed told us they had been beaten by their parents 40 percent had witnessed someone being killed 30 percent grew up with other family violence and 16 percent reported being sexually abused. When you listen to the stories of people who have committed violence, the distinction between victim and offender almost falls apart. The truth, however, is that most people who go to prison have had to deal with violence all their lives. NEWSLETTER: The top things you may have missed in policing. POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, mediaĬOLUMN: The next step in criminal justice reform is fewer laws This is a mistake that has put limits on criminal justice reforms designed to reduce the prison population. justice system is ill-prepared to acknowledge or treat. The complex reality of their lives - and the lives of so many other men and women like them - as both violent perpetrator and violence victim is one the U.S. Violent offenders, more often than not, are victims long before they commit their first crime: A former inmate who spent two years in a Boston prison for robbery was given away by his mother, a heroin addict, by the time he was 5 - the same year her boyfriends began beating him up when he was 8, he watched another kid get shot in the head in his housing project.Īnother man, in and out of prison from age 18 to 33 for assaults and drug crimes, grew up getting routinely beaten by his mother and frequently saw neighbors get stabbed and shot in the New York community of his childhood.Įach man, unlike many of the perpetrators who victimized them, faced harsh punishment.